About

The West African operation of historic gold mining company Gold Fields, consisting of Gold Fields Ghana Limited and Ghana-registered Abosso Goldfields Limited, is responsible for a significant portion of the firm’s overall output, providing $875m in revenues for 2015. The firms are also highly important to the Ghanaian economy, with Gold Fields Ghana Limited being the second highest taxpayer in the country for 2015. It is with this high-responsibility backdrop that the legal team at Gold Fields West Africa operates.

Like the rest of the Gold Fields group business units, the West African legal department maintains a ‘lean’ team in comparison to their peers, which has not prevented them from assisting the company to complete a number of important deals. Alongside an active M&A strategy, the legal team assisted the company to sign an agreement with an independent power producer and completed an ‘innovative supply chain agreement’, both of which should ‘lead to millions of dollars of savings to the business’. The Gold Fields West Africa legal team is well represented at the company’s strategic management level and sits on the regional executive committee, which underlines the importance of the legal team to the strategic direction of the company.